The Oakland Hotel

Early in the 1870's, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad decided that a resort hotel in this area would benefit its passenger train service. After building the Deer Park Hotel in 1873 and finding it so successful, the railroad began construction in 1875 of the 300-room Oakland Hotel on land directly across the Little Youghiogheny River from the Oakland train station. A short bridge west of the station platform carried a driveway through park-like lawns to the front of the hotel. Besides the main building, the property included auxiliary buildings, including a laundry for both the hotel and its guests. Two large 250,000-gallon railroad water tanks on the crest of the hill behind the building, originally designed to supply water to steam locomotives, provided water for hotel use. The Oakland Hotel was heavily advertised each season, and many patrons returned year after year to spend part of the summer there. Among its unusual features was a telegraph office in the hotel lobby, connected to the lobby of the Deer Park Hotel; in the early 1890's, those hotel-to-hotel wires, though extending only six miles, were attached to telephones and became the first telephone line in Garrett County. In 1900, because of dwindling patronage, the railroad sold the Oakland Hotel to a medical group for a proposed sanatorium, but the venture failed, and the hotel was torn down in 1909 for its lumber. A stone gas house, where artificial gas was generated for lights and cooking stoves during the hotel's early days, is the only remaining evidence of the 300-room Oakland Hotel.

Oakland, Maryland · United States